Friday 1 November 2013 13.30 EDT
First published on Friday 1 November 2013 13.30 EDT

Extremely bad weather in Britain is usually a local phenomenon, and tends to make headlines. In this way, it becomes part of the national memory only if it happens in the south. Perhaps this rule no longer holds as firm as it did – the Cockermouth floods of 2009 stand as a contrary example; perhaps we've become more interested in (and alarmed by) bad weather more generally, as an omen for all of us rather than a random event, an act of God, happening to other people elsewhere. In 1968, however, the old ways still applied. Early that year a wind hit western Scotland that, in its terrible effects, easily trumped this week's so-called St Jude's storm, destroying or damaging more homes than even 1987's great gale. It was probably modern Scotland's biggest natural disaster. And yet few people south of Carlisle seem to know of it, postwar Scotland living in a kind of appendix or annex to the big British narrative; an annex that was rarely consulted then and has not been much visited since.

In contrast to the much-hyped St Jude, the wind's approach went unadvertised. The Met Office was expecting an Atlantic depression known as Hurricane Low Q to continue its northeast course towards St Kilda and the Faroes when at some point during Sunday 14 January it veered east towards the Clyde estuary and one of the most decrepit cities in Europe. A few hours later, after Sunday became Monday, those of us on the late shift at the Scottish Daily Express noticed that the windows had begun to rattle and thud, as though an angry crowd were pounding on them. The Express building in Glasgow had big windows – like its sister offices in Manchester and Fleet Street, it used a lot of glass in its futurist design – and one or two of them began to crack and cave in. In fact, I have a memory of the panes actually bulging before they broke, an unlikely and possibly unscientific recollection. The winds were the strongest ever recorded in central Scotland – Glasgow registered gusts of 103mph, and more exposed places 120mph – and an office car delivered us home through a dark townscape of rolling chimney pots and flying slates.

Twenty-one people died that night, most of them between 3am and 5am, and three of them aboard a dredger that capsized off Greenock. At least another 100 were seriously injured and 1,800 made homeless. The wind tore down shipyard cranes and electricity pylons, church spires and school roofs, and ripped the glass from the big greenhouses of the upper Clyde valley, which then supplied Scotland with all of its tomatoes. Four per cent of Scotland's commercial forests, equivalent to 18 months' timber production, got flattened. A quarter of a million houses were damaged, more than 1,300 beyond repair. The death and destruction came too late to be recorded in Monday's papers, but Tuesday's Scottish Daily Express published pages and pages, including a memorable picture that looked down through the gaping floors of a Glasgow tenement, holed from top to bottom by a plunging chimney head. The street was close to my own.

In Glasgow and the old industrial towns around, chimney heads proved to be the storm's most lethal weapon. They were substantial structures, built to house the flues and pots required by a couple of dozen coal fires, but a century of neglect on a tenement that was sometimes still standing only through force of habit – in the 1960s several tenements collapsed spontaneously without the help of the slightest breeze – meant that they were ill-placed to survive a hurricane. Ted Heath, then leader of the opposition, toured Scotland in the storm's wake and told the Commons it was hard to visualise "what happens when three tons of solid masonry falls through a roof" unless you had seen it. "It goes through the roof, and the next floor, and the next floor, and creates a bomb crater in the basement, leaving death behind it."

It was Heath, oddly enough, who made the best speech in the parliamentary debate devoted to the storm, calling for more funds to put right the damage caused by what had to be seen as a national disaster (as opposed to a merely Scottish one). The contributions otherwise came entirely from Scottish MPs, and to read them now is to understand how decayed the fabric of urban western Scotland had become. Before the storm struck, 11,000 homes out of a Glasgow stock of 330,000 were already described as unfit for habitation, with another 75,000 classified as irreversibly substandard. Many of these dwellings, cramped and bathless, were still being bought for as little as £100 – the alternative meant taking your place with many thousand others in the queue for a council house. Many buyers were too poor to afford insurance; many flats were too ruinous to be insurable. The MPs agreed that the hurricane had exposed a century of neglect by careless landlords, impoverished householders and hard-pressed civic authorities. Heath spoke of the damage to residents' "chattels" that had been left for days after the storm to stand in the rain.

How much I, or any of us, understood that Glasgow stood close to the end of a historical process is hard to know. We imagined the city's spectacular disasters to be unconnected – no more or less than an unfortunate series of accidents – as they unfolded in the years between 1960 and 1972, starting with the exploding whisky warehouse that killed 19 firemen and ending with a fire in a textiles warehouse in which seven firemen died. In between came the great storm, and in the same year, a factory fire in which 22 employees suffocated or were burnt to death behind barred windows (the premises had once been a whisky bond), followed on the second day of 1971 by the crush on the stairway at Ibrox stadium that killed 66 Rangers fans. The list is not comprehensive.

An evocative new history of postwar Scotland, The Invisible Spirit by Kenneth Roy, has prompted me to remember these tragic events, and also made the thread running through perfectly clear: old buildings that had been cheaply and carelessly adapted for new purposes, complacent managements, inadequate inspection. And, as Roy says of the far-from-intensive inquiries into some of these disasters, "the establishment looked after its own, and the press meekly went along with it". The journalism of the day, in the Scottish Daily Express and elsewhere, displayed on its pages the effects of each disaster – the motherless child, the charred beams – rather than any prolonged inquiry into its causes.

Living in Scotland then was, as I say, like living in an annex to the bigger story. I don't necessarily make a nationalist, regretful point; to know the story of others when they haven't bothered to know yours, to learn about their great storms when they refuse to learn about yours, to have some small sense of how national identities can overlap – these things can be as stimulating as a second language. The fact that the London office of the Express didn't know where Greenock was, or imagined that we would replate the front page for news of Lady Docker … how could we be but lofty?